Insect biomechanics (planthopper nymph aerial righting)

Bioengineering PhD Student at Georgia Tech working in Dr. Saad Bhamla's lab

The core question in my research is how organisms adapt to extreme environments. I work on a poeciliid fish species complex that lives in several freshwater drainages in southern Mexico. Populations of this species have also successfully colonized nearby springs rich in hydrogen sulfide, a toxic gas lethal to most metazoans at low concentrations. I am interested in elucidating the genetic mechanisms underlying the adaptations in these fish living in sulfidic conditions and how their adaptation strategies differ looking across different springs. One area that I am focusing on is understanding changes in the regulatory networks that control the expression of genes related to hydrogen sulfide detoxification and aerobic metabolism. My research aims to discover candidate regulatory genes that control these processes in poeciliid fishes living in sulfidic environments by using differential gene expression, gene set enrichment analyses, and network analyses.

I am a third year Ph.D. student at Washington State University under the mentorship of Dr. Joanna Kelley. I am broadly interested in evolutionary genomics, population genetics, and adaptation to extreme environments.

I received my B.S. in Biology from Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA. I was fortunate to be introduced to research through the mentorship of Dr. Erika Iyengar during my time at Muhlenberg. I was also a participant in the University of Washington's Research Experience for Undergraduates at Friday Harbor Laboratories researching intertidal epibiosis. After graduating from Muhlenberg, I interned at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in the Departments of Entomology and Invertebrate Zoology. Before enrolling as a graduate student at Washington State University, I served two terms as an AmeriCorps member in Flagstaff, AZ and Seattle, WA.

I'm interested in how organisms adapt their locomotion strategies in response to dynamic and changing physical environments. My work has used mudskipper fish as living analogues for the vertebrate invasion of land, rapid intertidal burrowing in Pacific mole crabs, and terrestrial reorientation maneuvers in lizards to reveal biophysical principles of multifunctionality and adaptation. A significant component of my PhD research is focused on developing new mathematical and computational approaches that combine data-driven modeling and dynamical systems theory to reveal compositional mechanisms of adaptive behaviors in their ecological context..

I received a BS in physics, with a minor in mathematics, from Georgia Tech in 2015, where I worked with Prof. Dan Goldman. I am currently a PhD candidate in biophysics at UC Berkeley working with Prof. Robert Full.

I study how personality is associated with different physiological mechanisms. My overarching goal is to better understand why we see population variation from the perspective of studying the individual. My current research is conducted in laboratory settings which allows me to study interacting physiological mechanisms in controlled environments. I currently study acute stress responses in autonomic and endocrine systems, innate and adaptive immune function, gut microbiome diversity, and neuronal function. By collecting these cross-physiological system data, I can determine the networks that underlie behavioral phenotypes.

I am a third year PhD student at Penn State University. I study how physiological mechanisms interact and are associated with personality. My lab asks questions to understand why we see differences between individuals and to better understand life-long fitness and health consequences from these physiological differences. My goals are to better understand why we see population variation and understand the mechanisms allowing flexibility or stability in changing environments. To answer this question, I plan to study different physiological systems and create an integrated physiological profile to understand underlying mechanisms that result in varying fitness and health outcomes.

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My research projects integrate several levels of organization from cellular to ecosystem level. Currently, the research in my laboratory focuses on interaction biology of cnidarian holobiont members at ecological and evolutionary scales though more recently I have started to pivot towards conservation biology, social sciences, and policy in the marine realm and local and global scales.

Mónica trained as a marine biologist at the University of Miami. She did a first postdoc at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA on evolution of eukaryotes and a second postdoc at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. Mónica took a research scientist position at the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, CA where she started her work on coral genomics. After 8 years at the University of California Merced, she relocated to Penn State University where she is a Professor of Biology.

The focus of the Miller Lab is to investigate changes in the fluid dynamic environment of organisms as they grow or shrink in size over evolutionary or developmental time. In particular, we are interested in the efficiency of various mechanisms of fluid transport and locomotion. Our approach to these problems is to use kinematic and morphometric data to design physical models and numerical simulations. These models and simulations are then used to better understand the fluid dynamic forces experienced by organisms. Our work focuses on a few of model systems: 1) flight adaptations in the smallest flying insects, such as thrips and parasitoid wasps, 2) the mechanisms of blood pumping during development in the embryonic heart and over evolutionary time in chordate hearts, and 3) feeding currents generated by the upside down jellyfish.

Miller majored in the biological sciences at the University of Chicago, where she graduated with honors in 1995. After a master's degree in zoology at Duke University in 1999, she earned a Ph.D. in mathematics in 2004 at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. Her dissertation, A Computational Study of Flight in the Smallest Insects, was supervised by Charles S. Peskin.

After postdoctoral research at the University of Utah, she joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007, as an assistant professor of mathematics and adjunct assistant professor of biology. She became a full professor in 2018, before moving to the University of Arizona.

Developmental physiology. Control of size and shape in development. Polyphenisms. Allometry. Pattern formation.
I do wet-lab research on the above systems. I also do a lot of mathematical modeling of those systems.
In addition, I collaborate with Mike Reed (Duke Mathematcis) in modeling metabolic systems relevant to human health, in which we study the mecahnsism of robustness sand homeostasis.

I have been a Full Professor at Duke University since 1987.